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Thank you! I'll be here all week.

After I proved that I totally rock the vowel matras, yesterday my Hindi tutor and I had a discussion about - what else - filmy stars. She told me there are news stories going around that Mr. Bachchan strongly encouraged Aishwarya to marry a tree in order to level out some of the bad news in her horoscope.

This kept me up at night. Honestly.

I have no idea how to express how absolutely ridiculous and insulting I think this is (and illegal, according to some reports) without being disrespectful to a belief system I know very little about and do not share. So instead I'll say this: if Aishwarya had wanted a tall wooden husband, she would have married Arjun Rampal.

ok, this goes back a long way to the times when a girl's horoscope would indicate that a second wedding for her was on the cards (implying an early demise of the first husband). In such cases it is customary for the girl to symbolically get married to a tree so that her second (technically) marriage has no problems, thus neatly circumventing a vexing and potentially disastrous situation. Being the father of his only son, Amitabh is as superstitious as any man and wants to ward off such an eventuality. Hence his advice.

lemontart (great name, by the way!) and Angela - I've seen him in four movies, and I'm really not convinced he has any acting skills. To be fair, I just as easily could've said John Abraham.

Blohot - I can see the thinking, I'm grateful to have the explanation, and I admit this is a clever and relatively tidy solution to a problem in that it does not involve more people in the scheme. And if you have to marry a non-person, I guess a tree is as good a partner as any - they're generally benign and are friendly, shady forces in the world. However, "superstitious as any man" is a little bit problematic, since not everyone is superstitiuos.

pinke_v - I am delighted that it isn't just for women. As you say, these things are far less disconcerting to me when it's not only women who have to do them. As for the female Arjun Rampal, I might have to go with Priyanka, though I bet I could come up with someone even less skilled if I tried. I actually really like Ash, actually, though I know I'm basically alone on that.

well...the things people do to ward off unpleasant things on their astrologic charts.

Interestingly, quite a few famous personalities around the world have been influenced by astrology and tarot cards..I think one of the first ladies, Princess Di (???not sure about it) and others...we don't know what kinds of things they did or continue to do.